Mark Morris

by Joan Acocella

Mark Morris emerged in the 1980s as America's most exciting young choreographer. Two decades later, his position remains unchallenged. Morris was born in Seattle in 1956. His Mark Morris Dance Group began performing in New York in 1980. By the mid-eighties, PBS had aired an hour-long special on him, and his work was being presented by America's foremost ballet companies. Morris's dances are a mix of traditionalism and radicalism. They unabashedly address the great themes--love, grief, loneliness, religion, community--yet they are also lighthearted, irreverent, and scabrous.

Joan Acocella's probing portrait is the first book on this brilliant and controversial artist. Written with Morris's cooperation, it describes how he has lived and how he turns life--and music and narrative--into dance. Including 78 photographs, Mark Morris provides an ideal introduction to the life and work of one of America's leading artists.

Genres: Biography, Art, Nonfiction, LGBT

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1993

About the author

Joan B. Acocella was an American journalist who served as a dance and book critic for The New Yorker.

Acocella received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. Acocella was a 2012 Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Acocella has served as the senior critic and reviews editor for Dance Magazine and New York dance critic for the Financial Times. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and was appointed dance critic in 1998.

Her New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy", which appeared in the November 27, 1995 issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. (2004).

Reviews

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gushing account of Morris's choreographic work. Acocella brings many of Morris's life experiences and personality quirks to bear on a detailed series of dance analyses. Modern dance is harder than ballet for me to watch because I don't know the vocabulary -- indeed, the fun of it is that there is no set vocabulary. This book helped me better appreciate Morris's classical, inclusive and uplifting vision, as expressed through dance.

[carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually read this in graduate school. Joan Acocella writes about dance for the New Yorker and she's probably one of the only living dance critics who makes the movement of dance clear on the page.

[isa · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful work of criticism

[Kim Soskin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acocelila does a wonderful job of mixing Morris' biograhy with his dances. I saw the Morris group right after reading this book, and appreciated them even more because I understood much more of what was happening in the dance.

[Barbara Phillips-Farley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this biography and especially enjoyed the well-worded descriptions of dance phenomena that parallel music phenomena.